Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7, the final Full Support Phase release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 platform. As hybrid and multicloud computing helps to transform enterprise IT, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 delivers enhanced consistency and control across cloud infrastructure for IT operations teams while also providing a suite of modern, supported container creation tools for enterprise application developers.

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Frequently, modern applications built to run across the hybrid cloud are developed using Linux containers. Building cloud-native apps requires cloud-native development tools, like a container daemon, but these tools can introduce unnecessary risk and complexity into development environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7 now includes full support for Red Hat’s distributed container toolkit - buildah, podman and skopeo - on Red Hat Enterprise Linux workstation deployments with the Red Hat Universal Base Image, enabling developer teams to build, run and manage containerized applications across the hybrid cloud with a smaller, more manageable tool footprint.

IBM closed last month on one of the cloud industry’s largest acquisitions to date: its $34 billion grab of open-source cloud technology provider Red Hat.

The deal raises some questions: Will Red Hat help IBM catch up to cloud leaders Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services? How will Red Hat users be impacted by the deal? Those impacted by the acquisition agree it's still too early to tell, but they're bracing for potential integration challenges and progress in the hybrid cloud arena.

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Red Hat will operate as a distinct unit within IBM and will be reported as part of IBM's Cloud and Cognitive Software segment, officials made clear in a press release on the official acquisition closing, a sentiment IBM CEO Ginni Rometty shared at the Red Hat Summit in May, saying that, "Jim [Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst] and I have both agreed — Red Hat should stay an independent unit."

Red Hat's open hybrid cloud technologies, such as Linux and Kubernetes, will allow businesses under the IBM brand to manage data and applications on-premises and on private and multiple public clouds. The acquisition will also help customers shift “mission-critical workloads to the cloud and optimizing everything from supply chains to core banking systems.” Officials also promised businesses will be able to effectively manage their IT infrastructure, on and off-premises and across different clouds, private and public.

The GlusterFS network attached storage file-system developed by Red Hat with a focus on cloud computing is the latest open-source project eyeing the removal of 32-bit (i686) software support.

GlusterFS joins the growing list of Linux distributions and other upstream software projects working to deprecate or outright discontinue their 32-bit software support. There was a recent proposal to drop 32-bit platform support for GlusterFS. While initially proposed for the upcoming GlusterFS 7 release, it's looking like the removal will happen with the GlusterFS 8 release either at the very end of 2019 or early 2020.

Downstreams like Fedora are already working to incorporate the change with their plan now to see GlusterFS 32-bit support removed for Fedora 32 under a new change proposal.

The system was originally developed by Google, given to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and is now becoming the containerizing standard for most cloud-based business apps. The goal of the platform is to allow more concise, customized management of assets and services across a multitude of environments. In an increasingly globalized business model, this ability is imperative to remaining viable.

The architecture is constructed in layers, with the main server acting as the master among a cluster of machines that make up the infrastructure of that particular network. Each machine within this grouping is assigned a specific function, with the master server acting as the main control and switchboard. It receives requests from end-users, exposes API, performs health checks on nodes within the network of servers and schedules tasks to whichever server is designated to complete them.

The venerable mainframe computer is experiencing a surprising but well-deserved resurgence, as the organizations that depend on these systems realize how important they are for digital initiatives and for hybrid information technology strategies in general.

IBM Corp. – the sole remaining purveyor of mainframe systems – continues to invest in the platform, and Big Blue’s latest iteration, the z14 (pictured), is a masterpiece of scalability, reliability and security, as is its core operating system, z/OS.

Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, today welcomed 11 new members to its expanding enterprise blockchain community. The announcement comes as Hyperledger members from around the world are meeting in Tokyo, Japan, at the annual Hyperledger Member Summit, a two-day event dedicated to community-driven planning, training and networking.

There are many reasons for IBM’s recent purchase of Red Hat, but one of them became apparent today - the Big Blue has announced that it has packed more than 100 products across its software portfolio into containers, designed for Red Hat’s OpenShift.

Linux-based application containers package apps and all of their dependencies into individual virtual environments that can be easily moved between a variety of public and private clouds. This means that potentially IBM’s apps can run as easily on AWS, Azure or Alibaba as they would on the company’s own public infrastructure.

“IBM is unleashing its software from the data center to fuel the enterprise workload race to the cloud,” said Arvind Krishna, senior veep for cloud and cognitive stuff at IBM.

Communication is key. Your computer might be trying to tell you something important. But if your mail transport agent (MTA) isn’t properly configured, you might not be getting the notifications. Postfix is a MTA that’s easy to configure and known for a strong security record. Follow these steps to ensure that email notifications sent from local services will get routed to your internet email account through the Postfix MTA.

IBM’s massive $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat closed a few weeks ago and today, the two companies are now announcing the first fruits of this process. For the most part, today’s announcement furthers IBM’s ambitions to bring its products to any public and private cloud. That was very much the reason why IBM acquired Red Hat in the first place, of course, so this doesn’t come as a major surprise, though most industry watchers probably didn’t expect this to happen this fast.

Specifically, IBM is announcing that it is bringing its software portfolio to Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based container platform that is essentially available on any cloud that allows its customers to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Post the completion of Red Hat acquisition, IBM has started building bridges between the product and services of the two companies. IBM has reengineered its software portfolio to now be "cloud-native and optimized to run on Red Hat OpenShift."

The Debian community has announced the release of Debian 10 "Buster" (https://www.debian.org/News/2019/20190706). Debian is one of the most popular GNU/Linux-based distributions. Buster will be supported for the next five years.

Buster ships with several desktop environments including Cinnamon 3.8, GNOME 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14, LXDE 0.99.2, LXQt 0.14, MATE 1.20, and Xfce 4.12. In this release, GNOME will default to using the Wayland display server instead of Xorg. "The Xorg display server is still installed by default and the default display manager allows users to choose Xorg as the display server for their next session," according to a blog post from the Debian project.

I started running an SKS keyserver a couple of years ago (don't really remember, but I think it was around 2014). I am, as you probably expect me to be given my lines of work, a believer of the Web-of-Trust model upon which the PGP network is built. I have published a couple of academic papers (Strengthening a Curated Web of Trust in a Geographically Distributed Project, with Gina Gallegos, Cryptologia 2016, and Insights on the large-scale deployment of a curated Web-of-Trust: the Debian project’s cryptographic keyring, with Victor González Quiroga, Journal of Internet Services and Applications, 2018) and presented several conferences regarding some aspects of it, mainly in relation to the Debian project.

We have been working away at getting epel8 ready (short status: we have builds and are building fedpkg and bodhi and all the other tools maintainers need to deal with packages and hope to have some composes next week), and I would like to introduce a new thing we are trying with epel8: The epel8-playground.

epel8-playground is another branch for all epel8 packages. By default when a package is setup for epel8 both branches are made, and when maintainers do builds in the epel8 branch, fedpkg will build for _both_ epel8 and epel8-playground. epel8 will use the bodhi updates system with an updates-testing and stable repo. epel8-playground will compose every night and use only one repo.

In Part 1 of this series, we detailed the hardware and software architecture of our testing lab, as well as benchmarking methodology and Ceph cluster baseline performance. In this post, we?ll take our benchmarking to the next level by drilling down into the performance evaluation of MySQL database workloads running on top of Red Hat OpenStack Platform backed by persistent block storage using Red Hat Ceph Storage.

One of the great things about Red Hat OpenShift is the ability to develop both Cloud Native and traditional applications. Often times, when thinking about traditional applications, the first thing that comes to mind is the ability to store things on the file system. This could be media, metadata, or any type of content that your application relies on but isn’t stored in a database or other system.

To illustrate the concept of persistent storage (i.e. storage that will persist even when a container is stopped or recreated), I created a sample application for tracking my electronic books that I have in PDF format. The library of PDF files can be stored on the file system, and the application relies on this media directory to present the titles to the user. The application is written in Java using the Spring Boot framework and scans the media directory for PDF files. Once a suitable title is found, the application generates a thumbnail image of the book and also determines how many pages it contains. This can be seen in the following image:

On a stormy Tuesday in July, a group of 30 young programmers gathered in New York City to take on natural disasters. The attendees—most of whom were current college students and alumnae of the nonprofit Girls Who Code—had signed up for a six-hour hackathon in the middle of summer break.

Flash floods broke out across the city, but the atmosphere in the conference room remained upbeat. The hackathon was hosted in the downtown office of IBM as one of the final events in this year’s Call for Code challenge, a global competition sponsored by IBM and the Linux Foundation. The challenge focuses on using technology to assist survivors of catastrophes including tropical storms, fires, and earthquakes.

Recent satellite hackathon events in the 2019 competition have recruited developers in Cairo to address Egypt’s national water shortage; in Paris to brainstorm AI solutions for rebuilding the Notre Dame cathedral; and in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, to improve resilience in the face of future hurricanes.

Those whose proposals follow Call for Code’s guidelines are encouraged to submit to the annual international contest for a chance to win IBM membership and Linux tech support, meetings with potential mentors and investors, and a cash prize of US $200,000. But anyone who attends one of these optional satellite events also earns another reward: the chance to poke around inside the most prized software of the Call for Code program’s corporate partners.

Datacenter maintenance – you dread it, right? Staying up all night to make sure everything runs smoothly and nothing crashes, or possibly losing an entire weekend to maintenance if something goes wrong. Managing your datacenter can be a real drag. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

At SUSECON 2019, Raine and Stephen discussed how SUSE can help ease your pain with SUSE Manager, a little Salt and a few best practices for datacenter management and automation.

DevNation Live tech talks are hosted by the Red Hat technologists who create our products. These sessions include real solutions and code and sample projects to help you get started. In this talk, you’ll learn about Keycloak from Sébastien Blanc, Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat.

This tutorial will demonstrate how Keycloak can help you secure your microservices. Regardless of whether it’s a Node.js REST Endpoint, a PHP app, or a Quarkus service, Keycloak is completely agnostic of the technology being used by your services. Learn how to obtain a JWT token and how to propagate this token between your different secured services. We will also explain how to add fine-grained authorizations to these services.

L10n (short for “localization”) is the Fedora sub-project dedicated to translation. It is unique in its form and organization because under this label are a set of autonomous teams of speakers. Some statistics will show you the reduction of our community, and invite you to come discuss with us at Flock.

First, the number of unique contributors per week, by time in the project (based on the model of what Matthew Miller does in his “state of Fedora” talk each year at Flock).

The main goal for the next half of the internship is deploying the project locally to Minishift and then in production on OpenShift. This will help see in effect the badges for Fedora Happiness Packet in action! I will also be preparing for the project showcase at the annual contributor summit, Flock to Fedora. As a stretch goal I hope to integrate the filter methods for the search option in archive.

Corey Quinn opened his lightning talk at the 17th annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 17x) with an apology. Corey is a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, writes Last Week in AWS, and hosts the Screaming in the Cloud podcast. He's also a funny and engaging speaker. Enjoy this video "The cloud is a scam," to learn why he wants to apologize and how to find out if the cloud is right for you.

Google this week said it would for the first time natively support VMware workloads in its Cloud service, giving customers more options for deploying enterprise applications.

The hybrid cloud service called Google Cloud VMware Solution by CloudSimple will use VMware software-defined data center (SDCC) technologies including VMware vSphere, NSX and vSAN software deployed on a platform administered by CloudSimple for GCP.

The Reactica roller coaster is the latest addition to Coderland, our fictitious amusement park for developers. It illustrates the power of reactive computing, an important architecture for working with groups of microservices that use asynchronous data to work with each other.

In this scenario, we need to build a web app to display the constantly updated wait time for the coaster.

The recent proposal to drop Fedora's Modular and Everything repositories for the upcoming Fedora 31 release is yet to be decided after it was deferred at this week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting.

The proposal is about ending the i686 Modular and Everything repositories beginning with the Fedora 31 cycle later this year. But this isn't about ending multi-lib support, so 32-bit packages will continue to work from Fedora x86_64 installations. But as is the trend now, if you are still running pure i686 (32-bit x86) Linux distributions, your days are numbered. Separately, Fedora is already looking to drop their i686 kernels moving forward and they are not the only Linux distribution pushing for the long overdue retirement of x86 32-bit operating system support.

Borislav Petkov has taken to improve the Linux kernel's memset function with it being an area previously criticzed by Linus Torvalds and other prominent developers.
Petkov this week published his initial patch for better optimizing the memset function that is used for filling memory with a constant byte.

In addition to the work being led by DigitalOcean on core scheduling to make Hyper Threading safer in light of security vulnerabilities, IBM and Oracle engineers continue working on Kernel Address Space Isolation to help prevent data leaks during attacks.
Complementing the "Core Scheduling" work, Kernel Address Space Isolation was also talked about at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The address space isolation work for the kernel was RFC'ed a few months ago as a feature to prevent leaking sensitive data during attacks like L1 Terminal Fault and MDS. The focus on this Kernel ASI is for pairing with hypervisors like KVM as well as being a generic address space isolation framework.

While Intel CPUs aren't shipping with 5-level paging support, they are expected to be soon and distribution kernels are preparing to enable the kernel's functionality for this feature to extend the addressable memory supported. With that, the mainline kernel is also looking at flipping on 5-level paging by default for its default kernel configuration.
Intel's Linux developers have been working for several years on the 5-level paging support for increasing the virtual/physical address space for supporting large servers with vast amounts of RAM. The 5-level paging increases the virtual address space from 256 TiB to 128 PiB and the physical address space from 64 TiB to 4 PiB. Intel's 5-level paging works by extending the size of virtual addresses to 57 bits from 48 bits.

Using open source software is commonplace, with only a minority of companies preferring a proprietary-first software policy. Proponents of free and open source software (FOSS) have moved to the next phases of open source adoption, widening FOSS usage within the enterprise as well as gaining the “digital transformation” benefits associated with open source and cloud native best practices.
Companies, as well as FOSS advocates, are determining the best ways to promote these business goals, while at the same time keeping alive the spirit and ethos of the non-commercial communities that have embodied the open source movement for years.

Releasing Slax 9.11.0

New school year has started again and next version of Slax is here too :) this time it is 9.11.0. This release includes all bug fixes and security updates from Debian 9.11 (code name Jessie), and adds a boot parameter to disable console blanking (console blanking is disabled by default).
You can get the newest version at the project's home page, there are options to purchase Slax on DVD or USB device, as well as links for free download.
Surprisingly for me we skipped 9.10, I am not sure why :)
I also experimented with the newly released series of Debian 10 (code name Buster) and noticed several differences which need addressing, so Slax based on Debian 10 is in progress, but not ready yet. Considering my current workload and other circumstances, it will take some more time to get it ready, few weeks at least.
Also: Slax 9.11 Released While Re-Base To Debian 10 Is In Development

KDE Frameworks 5.62.0 and Reports From Akademy 2019 in Milan

KDE Frameworks are over 70 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks web page.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

The last week I was in Milan with my wife Aiswarya to attend Akademy 2019, the yearly event of the KDE community. Once again it was a great experience, with lots of interesting conferences and productive BoF sessions (“Birds of a Feather”, a common name for a project meeting during a conference).
On Sunday, we presented our talk “GCompris in Kerala, part 2”. First, Aiswarya told some bits of Free-Software history in Kerala, gave examples of how GCompris is used there, and explained her work to localize the new version of GCompris in Malayalam (the language of this Indian state). Then I made a quick report of what happened in GCompris the last 2 years, and talked about the things to come for our next release.

I attended my first ever Akademy! The event was held at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Milan, Italy this year. And the experience was splendid. During the 2 day conference, I had the opportunity to talk at the Student Showcase, where all of the SoC students presented their work to the community. There were about 8 students, and everyone gave a good briefing on their project.
My project this summer was with Kdenlive, the open source non linear professional video editor. I proposed to revamp one of the frequently used tools in the editor, called the Titler tool, which is used to create title clips. Title clips are video clips that contain text and/or images that are composited or appended to your video (eg: subtitles). The problem with the titler tool as it is, is that it uses QGraphicsView to describe a title clip and QGraphicsView was deprecated since the release of Qt5. This obviously leads to problems - upstream bugs crawling affecting the functionality of the tool and an overall degradation in the ease of maintenance of the codebase. Moreover, adding new features to the existing code base was no easy task and therefore, a complete revamp was something in sights of the developer community in Kdenlive for a long time now. I proposed to rework on the backend for the period of GSoC replacing the use of XML with QML and use a new rendering backend with QQuickRenderControl, along with a new MLT module to handle the QML frames. I was able to cover most of the proposed work, I seek to continue working on it and finish evolving the titler tool.